I've been a (mostly) loyal Apple Music user for years. I’ve even defended it against other streaming services for its editorial quality and seeming emphasis on albums over algorithms. In as many words: I like the platform. The integration with my devices is seamless, the sound quality and classical-specific features are great, and the vast library contains just about anything I could want. But despite this, I've found myself shopping around for a new one. Not because Apple Music lacks features or fails to work well on my devices, but because of a more insidious issue: it has a nasty habit of slowly eating my music.
Piece by piece, year by year, Apple Music has been corrupting the order and integrity of my (and your) library. Tracks get swapped out for different versions, albums get split into multiple releases, and playlists lose key components. As someone who stubbornly clings to the album format and has a broad sense of what I’ve saved and what I haven’t, this slow degradation makes me feel like I’m going crazy. I add albums to my library expecting them to remain intact, only to return and find that Apple Music has decided, without informing me, to replace certain tracks with versions from different albums or compilations. Sometimes I don’t even realize anything is wrong until I start playing a record and some of the tracks are just missing, gone forever.
I’ll explain why I think this is happening later, but suffice it to say that the problem is widespread and ongoing 1, 2, 3, 4. There are now even apps that promise to back up your library, so that when the forces of entropy work their evil magic, you’ll be insured. For some, this might seem like a minor inconvenience. But for those of us who value the cohesive artistic gesture that an album represents, these subtle corruptions are like a significant loss.
But the slow slide into chaos doesn't stop there. Apple Music also has a penchant for deleting songs from playlists. Sometimes just because it feels like it, but there’s one particular method that never fails. If you've added an album to your library and later removed it, any songs from that album embedded in your playlists vanish without a trace. For comparison: imagine painstakingly crafting a physical mixtape culled from your collection, only to have the tracks erase themselves from the tape if you gave away the source albums. It's madness!
So what's going on here? My theory is that these problems stem from Apple Music's uniquely mutant approach to library management. It's trying to merge two distinct paradigms: the cloud-based streaming model and the traditional local library model.
On one hand, we have the cloud metaphor, used by basically every other major streaming service, where music exists as read-only objects in the cloud—bookmarks to songs that we don't own but can access. On the other hand, there's the zombie legacy of iTunes, where users built extensive personal libraries of local files, manually importing and managing each owned track.
Apple Music, conceived originally as an outgrowth from iTunes, attempts to bridge these worlds. But by stapling the cloud model onto a local library system, it breaks the functionality of both. The platform doesn't seem to know whether to treat our saved music as parts of an ‘owned’ personal collection or as bookmarks to things managed and altered by the backend.
Take the playlist problem for example. This behavior would be easily explained by the local library metaphor: when you delete a file from your library, of course any pointers to it should be removed from your playlists. You don’t want to have an empty gap in your playlist where your file once was. But in the era of cloud shortcuts, this makes no sense. There’s no inherent connection between the cloud shortcut in the playlist and the one in your library. They can exist perfectly independently. So why should deleting one delete the other?
This leads to entropy. The system feels entitled to modify our libraries—swapping tracks, updating versions, and removing songs—because, from a cloud perspective, the system is only helping redirect these pointers. But from a library standpoint, the new pointers are not the same as the things they’re replacing. They have different album art and release info, even different sounds entirely.
The frustration is amplified by the lack of transparency and control. We aren't given clear options to prevent these changes, nor are we informed when they occur. For those who value control over their libraries, the erosion of trust is palpable. How can we invest time curating our collections if they can be altered or dismantled without warning?
So, what is to be done?
I have a couple of suggestions:
A streaming service should give our libraries homes, and allow them to grow and change over time in a way that we choose. Apple Music has such great potential. It’s beautiful, intuitive, and it has a massive catalog. It also has a lot of niche features (built-in radio! proper metadata for classical!) that make my heart warm. But I can’t rely on it as a failsafe archive for my albums and playlists if it continues down this path of gradual decay.
Until then, I'll be exploring other options, hoping that Apple Music doesn’t collapse my library into a black hole.
Published September 26, 2024